Tag: reboot7

Twenty years ago today E and I visited Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. What I wrote a decade ago at the 10th anniversary of that conference still holds true for me.

Over time Reboot 7 became mythical. A myth that can’t return. But one we were part of, participated in and shaped.
Still got the t-shirt.


The yellow t-shirt with red text from the 2005 Reboot 7 conference, on my blue reading chair in my home office 20 years on.

Seventeen years ago today I blogged about a barcamp style event in Amsterdam I co-hosted, called GovCamp_NL. I struck up a conversation there about open government data after having had a similar conversation the week before in Austria. It marked the beginning of my work in this field. We just welcomed the thirteenth team member in the company that over time grew out of that first conversation. Our work at my company is driven by the same thing as the event, something I’ve come to call constructive activism.

These days, the principles and values that drove those events, and have set the tone for the past two decades of everything I’ve done professionally and socially, seem more important than ever. They are elemental in the current geopolitical landscape around everything digital and data. We can look back on our past selves with 20 years hindsight and smile about our one time optimism, because so much exploitation, abuse and surveillance grew out of the platforms and applications that originate in the early 00’s. But not because that optimism was wrong. Naive yes, in thinking that the tech would all take care of itself, by design and by default, and we just needed to nudge it a bit. That optimism in the potential for (networked) agency, for transparency, for inclusion, for diversity, and for global connectedness is still very much warranted, as a celebration of human creativity, of the sense of wonder that wielding complexity for mutual benefit provides, just not singularly attached to the tech involved.
Anything digital is political. The optimism is highly political too.

The time to shape the open web and digital ethics is now, is every day. Time for a reboot.

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Robert Scoble was one of the key note speakers at the Reboot conference last week in Copenhagen. Like some 1500 of his colleagues at Microsoft he blogs frequently and openly on issues that are work related. Not always does what he blogs fit well with his company, he can be very critical of his employer, or with his readership (he defends controversial MS issues just as energetic as he criticizes other points, although sometimes he comes back on that gracefully). How come that this doesn’t backlash at him?

Being a blogger-in-residence with a company, blogging is like pushing a membrane. A membrane that seperates the organisation from its environment. Where marketing and pr often really increase the distance between company and environment (thickening the membrane), blogging seeks to penetrate the membrane. The membrane can be seen as the collective cultural and behavioural aspects that make up the company and make it different from the rest of the world. Pushing against the membrane will result in resistance; the membrane is flexible but it is still a barrier of sorts. Pushing too hard might make the membrane snap back in your face. That is when you know you may have crossed a boundary within the organization that others don’t feel entirely comfortable with.

Key is what happens when that membranes hits you in the face. If you have a good social network in place, that carries the trust that you as a blogger also have the interest of the company at heart, and the conviction that any issues can be discussed openly and securely within the company, then that network will help you cushion the backlash of the membrane. It will lead to reflection within the organization on how to move on.

If you lack such a social network, then chances are you find yourself without a job real soon, as happened to that guy at Google. A clear case of not having invested in your relationships within the company, says Robert Scoble.

A membrane, with both its elasticity and resistance, as a metaphor for the cultural border/divide between an organization and its environment is I think a useful one. It gives expression to something all employees, and customers for that matter, might recognize to some extent. For companies and employees thinking about starting an external weblog associated with both a person and a company, it makes sense to think about the membrane beforehand. Not to lay down rules in advance, but to make sure that there is continuous feedback from colleagues to the weblogging employee, as well as to ensure that there is a space to talk things over when an issue arises. Only in this way can you make sure that the weblog lets the authentic voice of the author ring true as well as conveys the values of the company in question.

David Wilcox taped interviews on video during Reboot and talked some more with Robert Scoble about membranes.

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In 1968 Doug Engelbart demonstrated the computersystem he and his team were working with. This famous demo we saw tonight, as a round-up of the day. Doug was life on a video connection (established by Ross Mayfield it seemed) introducing the demo himself.
Great to see how old-fashioned it was, and how modern it is at the same time. Using tv cameras to capture what computers projected on small cathode ray tubes, and then projecting that on computer screens, a mouse (they came up with the name) that looks like some communist Eastern German version of what we use today. But the programme demonstrated had hyperlinks, (joint) text editing, mind mapping, conceptual maps, directory structure, pretty sleek head sets etc. Fun to watch. But 40 years is a really long time for this stuff to get mainstream!
Below two pictures of Doug Engelbart now and then.
dougnow.jpg dougthen.jpg

[UPDATE] Ross Mayfield took pictures of Doug Engelbart during our videochat. On the screen you see us at the venue in Copenhagen, while Doug is talking to us:

Doug Engelbart talking to us at Reboot, image by Ross Mayfield, license CC BY NC